Geographical Techniques Questions and Answers

Answer: C

The feature shown in pictorial form is monuments.

Pictorial (pictogram) symbols are small drawings that look like what they stand for, and they suit discrete, qualitative point features: a temple, fort, church or monument, an airport, a mine. A reader recognises the symbol without a legend, which is why tourist maps use them.

Rainfall and elevation are continuous quantities, shown by isolines or layer shading, and population distribution is shown with dot maps or choropleths. None of these can be drawn as a picture of the thing itself.

Answer: B

A tuple or record is a row.

In a relational database, a table (relation) stores data about one kind of entity. Each row holds all the values for one instance of that entity, such as one student or one land parcel, and this row is called a tuple or record.

Each column holds one attribute (field), such as name or area, for every record. The table is the whole relation, made up of the rows and columns. So column, attribute and table each name a different part of the structure.

Answer: D

Statements (1) and (3) are true, so the answer is (1) and (3) are true.

Electromagnetic radiation travels at the speed of light, about 3 × 10⁸ m/s in a vacuum (1), and it consists of electric and magnetic fields oscillating at right angles to each other and to the direction of travel (3).

Statement (2) is false: EMR needs no medium and passes through a vacuum, which is how sunlight reaches the earth. Statement (4) is false: since speed = wavelength × frequency and the speed is constant, wavelength and frequency are inversely proportional. Every option including (2) or (4) is wrong.

Answer: C

The key accepts all three statements, so the answer is (a), (b) and (c) are true.

Vector data stores points, lines and polygons with their coordinates and the topology linking them, which is a more complex data structure than the simple grid of cells used for raster data (a). Satellite and aerial images are raster data, so vector data cannot be used with them directly without conversion (b).

Because vector lines keep their connections, vector data is efficient for network analysis such as finding the shortest route along roads or tracing flows through pipes (c). With all three accepted, each option marking one of them false is wrong.

Answer: A

The distance between isotherms indicates the temperature gradient.

Isotherms join places with the same temperature. Where they are close together, temperature changes quickly over a short distance, a steep gradient, as across coasts and fronts; where they are far apart, temperature changes slowly, a gentle gradient, as over large uniform oceans.

Pressure anomalies are shown by isobars, not isotherms. Temperature lag is the delay between the time of maximum insolation and maximum temperature, and the deviation from normal temperature is shown on isanomal maps. The spacing of isotherms measures none of these.

Answer: D

The altimetric frequency curve is used for the computation of elevation above sea level.

An altimetric frequency analysis records, from a contour map, how often each height or height class occurs, for example by reading spot heights or grid-point elevations. Plotted as a curve or histogram, it shows the distribution of land at different elevations and helps identify erosion surfaces, where many points share the same height.

It is a technique of relief and morphometric analysis. Population, pressure and rainfall distributions are mapped with dot maps, isobars and isohyets, not with altimetric frequency curves.

Answer: A

Interpolation of contours means drawing contour lines on a map when spot heights are given.

When a map shows only scattered spot heights, contours are drawn by interpolation: the position of each contour value is estimated between pairs of neighbouring spot heights, on the assumption that the slope between them is uniform, and the points of equal height are then joined by smooth lines.

Measuring gradient along contours, interpreting the landforms the contours show, and joining contours for a particular use are different tasks. Interpolation is specifically the estimation of contour positions between known heights.

Answer: C

Statements (1) and (2) are true and (3) is false, so the answer is Statements (1) and (2) are true but (3) is false.

The correlation coefficient r runs from −1 to +1. A value close to +1 is a strong positive correlation (1), and a value of 0 means no linear correlation (2).

Statement (3) is false: a value close to −1 is a strong negative correlation, not a weak one. The sign gives only the direction of the relationship; its strength depends on how close the value is to 1 in either direction. That rules out the options accepting (3) or rejecting (2).

Answer: A

Nearest neighbour analysis is best suited to the distribution of settlements.

The technique, developed by Clark and Evans (1954) and widely used in settlement geography, measures the average distance from each point to its nearest neighbour and compares it with the distance expected in a random pattern. The resulting index tells whether points such as villages or towns are clustered, random or regularly spaced.

It works on point patterns. Density of population, literacy rate and sex ratio are values attached to areas, mapped by choropleth or similar methods, not point distributions to which nearest neighbour analysis applies.

Answer: B

The ergograph shows the relationship between climate and growing seasons of crops (printed 'ages').

Devised by Griffith Taylor, the ergograph combines a place's monthly climatic data, temperature and rainfall, with the growing and harvesting seasons of its main crops, and sometimes human activity through the year. It shows at a glance how the agricultural calendar fits the climate.

Temperature and rainfall alone are plotted on a climograph or hythergraph, and relative humidity with temperature on a climograph of the Taylor type. Temperature and pressure are not the pair an ergograph is built to show.